China Still Moving Forward
Factory activity in China slowed slightly in January, official data showed Sunday, as the country rushed to stamp out a recent coronavirus wave in northern China.
The purchasing managers' index (PMI), a key gauge of manufacturing activity, came in at 51.3 this month, as the world's second-largest economy tightened Covid-19 precautions ahead of the Lunar New Year.
The figure was slightly below December's reading of 51.9, although still above the 50-point mark separating growth from contraction.
"Recently, local clusters of the epidemic emerged successively in many places across the country, and the production and operations of some enterprises were temporarily affected," said National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) senior statistician Zhao Qinghe.
Zhao added that the period around the Lunar New Year is traditionally an "off-peak season" for the manufacturing industry.
The latest data indicated that the business climate remains weak for small firms, although domestic consumption picked up ahead of the festive period.
Export demand slowed after Christmas as the pandemic continued spreading worldwide, the NBS said.
China's non-manufacturing PMI saw a larger drop to 52.4, from 55.7 last month, taking a bigger hit from the domestic virus resurgence.
Industries including accommodation and catering saw a "more significant" drop in activity, while the construction industry went into an off-season.
"The services sector may bear the brunt of the new wave of Covid-19, tightening social distancing rules and the reimposition of lockdown measures and travel bans in some parts of China," said a recent Nomura research report.
"The construction sector may face some downward pressure from colder-than-usual weather this winter," it added.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
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